Severalsources have been reporting on the GPL'ing of YaST, SUSE's system administration and setup tool that is fairly well-integrated into KDE (and reportedly even more so in SUSE 9.1). While this suddenly makes SUSE all the more palatable to the free software community, it could also be quite interesting for KDE. YaST is potentially a starting point for a free cross-distribution, and eventually maybe even cross-platform, KDE-based administration tool.

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A few months ago, and in response to Bruce Perens' UserLinux proposal, a bunch of Debian and KDE guys came up with a Debian+KDE distribution, maybe based on the work of SkoleLinux or arklinux. Among the requirements, I can think of right now, there was the installer, and a unified control-panel-like software, similar to YaST. What has happened to that project? Has it gone away, or is someone working on it? It would clearly benefit from YaST (provided moving from SuSE to Debian is straightforward).

Skole is independend from Bruce Perens. It was more like Bruce Perens made the fuzz and Skolelinux said: Well, we already got it.

Skole is from Skandinavia and a very good debian distribution. In Nothern Germany there is also a lot Skole expertise.

Don't care about Bruce Perens, his UserLinux is vaporware.

I always found SuSe the best distribution despite the fact that they don't ship knights with KDE but this ugly old X chessboard.

BTW: As you can customize the OO toolbar, is it possible to fully Microsoftify the OpenWriter toolbars per default? I created my own toolbars but I am not finished yet. As OO provides the same backend functions it must be possible to get a better surface (don't like MSOffice 2003 but 2000 style is fine). Abiword tries to imitate the MS Office appearences but fails on the buggy backend.

>Don't care about Bruce Perens, his UserLinux is vaporware.
I've seen a lot of activity in Userlinux lately, and it's gaining momentum IMHO. So I don't know what makes you think like that, Userlinux has much more potentian than, say, Fedora project.

It will never be vaporware since Debian is an excelent enviroment for make a new distribution on top of it (check mepis, its a one man distro). It has the broadest package list around and the great apt tool. The biggest problem apart installation seems to be it has too many options, dozens of window managers, hundreds of multimedia applications, e-mail clients, developer tools etc etc etc. It gets confusing for the user to choose one or even know about it, specially when the choices are so complex as the desktop enviroment of choice or server technology.

Personally i don't like SuSE. The reason is simple, it made choices that are not my own (RPM, KDE, proprietary software - which will be gpled soon, thats good, closed development, all that stuff in /opt and other things). Happilly for me, and to many others as it seems, Userlinux will use mostly software my/their prefered package set, and it's open development model promises it will be a great distro. Of course that's no reason for me to flame over SuSE and others.

"The biggest problem apart installation seems to be it has too many options, dozens of window managers, hundreds of multimedia applications, e-mail clients, developer tools etc etc etc. It gets confusing for the user to choose one or even know about it, specially when the choices are so complex as the desktop enviroment of choice or server technology."

That's not the job of the users, or even the enterprise. It is the job of a competent service vendor/provider to use the flexibility of the software to create a path that is cost-effective and does the job. That's something Userlinux seems to have missed.

"Personally i don't like SuSE. The reason is simple, it made choices that are not my own (RPM, KDE, proprietary software - which will be gpled soon, thats good, closed development, all that stuff in /opt and other things)."

LOL! You can make exactly the same accusation of Userlinux.

"Happilly for me, and to many others as it seems, Userlinux will use mostly software my/their prefered package set, and it's open development model promises it will be a great distro."

Mmm. Unfortunately, what you want doesn't necessarily equate into success for Userlinux.

"I've seen a lot of activity in Userlinux lately, and it's gaining momentum IMHO."

Well, if you have zero momentum in the beginning, even a tiny increase would mean that you are "gaining momentum". And that's the way it seems to be with UserLinux.

"Personally i don't like SuSE. The reason is simple, it made choices that are not my own (RPM, KDE, proprietary software - which will be gpled soon, thats good, closed development, all that stuff in /opt and other things)."

Well, you are not forced to install that proprietary software. And you can use desktop/WM of your choice, not just KDE (if you don't like KDE, what are you doing here BTW?). And what are you talking about "closed developement"? SUSE is the primary backer of ALSA, are they "closed"? They also emply several kernel-hackers, is their work "closed"?

Well that's good about YaST, but I never quite understood why it was closed in the first place. Mandrake have always been open with their tools, and it didn't make any difference to them, so I don't know why Suse did it.

Without creating a huge massive long thread of stupid licensing posts, I'm just wondering what the licensing implications are with Qt when moving from proprietary to free, or free to proprietary software. However, I suppose it also depends on how something like YaST is structured.

"YaST is potentially a starting point for a free cross-distribution, and eventually maybe even cross-platform, KDE-based administration tool."

This is why I think that some of the work going on at freedesktop is really, really positive. It will make this sort of thing much, much easier. However, it seems as though YaST is somewhat GUI independent, so it doesn't really depend on Qt. I suppose it could quite easily have a GTK or a web front-end as well.

"In other good news, it has been reported..."

Mmm. I certainly didn't detect the new found promotion of Gnome that some people seem to have been talking about in that article. Seems like the same as always.

"...by beta users that the KDE Desktop, several key KDE applications as well as a KDE'fied OpenOffice.org are featured exclusively in the SUSE 9.1 Personal."

The KDEification of Open Office is an 'extremely' positive thing. Yes Open Office is a bit of a dog of an application, but there are some really great features in it, and having been fed MS Office for years it has brought back some of the really good ones. Even over and above look and feel issues, a priority for this should be integration with KDE's dialogues, and in particular, the printing system. Open Office and KDE's printing system - mmmmmm..... Jan Holesovsky has done some stellar work on this in a pretty short space of time. Open Office 2.0 should be a great target platform for all this work, and I think these KDE enhancements are coming at just the right time, rather than as the result of hype.

YaST was never closed-source. The license was similiar to GPL, but didn't allow people to make money from it. Slight difference, but it just allows SuSE (you know, the company that spent money to develop it) to make money from it.

As a long time MDK user, I have some questions about SUSE that I'm hoping someone can answer....

1) Aside from some commercial applications and ports to other architectures (which I don't have any current use for), what is the difference between the professional and personal versions of SUSE?

2) One of the nice things about MDK is that I get all of the development packages for the binaries. This means that I can compile stuff that MDK doesn't include. I do this a lot. The personal version of SUSE claims to only have 1 installation CD. How do SUSEers get the devel packages if they want to compile their own stuff? Do they need to get the source and compile, or are there RPM's provided by SUSE somewhere? If these RPM's are provided, how do you get them? Can I get them on CDROM or do I have to download them one at a time from an FTP site or something?

3) How are updates handled? MDK uses mirrors to handle security updates. Does SUSE do the same in an automatic fashion? Do they use mirrors or direct downloads from their own servers?

4) One of the big reasons I use MDK is the fact that I *know* that I can say to someone, "Hey, you want to try Linux? I've got this MDK CD that I can burn for you and give you. Yes, it's totally legal to do this." In the past, SUSE wouldn't let me do this because of YAST. With the GPLing of YAST, does this mean that I'll be able to redistribute SUSE now?

5) This sounds petty, but it's important. I give MDK money because I know they have a good product. I would prefer not to give SUSE money until I have the same confidence. Are there any plans to have ISO's available for installs? Yes, I know you can do an FTP install, but I like installation CD's available if something goes wrong. Will cheapbytes have CD's available (likely determined by the answer to question 4)?

6) URPMI rocks. Does SUSE include something similar to URPMI or apt? For the most part, URPMI has made me forget all about dependancy hell that I used to have to deal with when I used RedHat.

7) One of the nice things about RedHat is their application installation GUI. MDK doesn't have anything like it, but when you use RedHat, you can go in and see (for example) that you have 10 of 12 KDE packages installed. Diving in deeper, you can see the 10 you have and the 2 that you don't have installed with a little info blurb on each one. This paints a nice overview of your system and helps people see what is available without having to grep through filenames on the CD. How does SUSE handle this?

Thanks in advance for anyone helping to remove my ignorance of SUSE :)

I haven't used SuSE since 7.3, but I'll answer from my experience years ago...

1) and 2)

The main difference was that Professional shipped with all of those development packages, as well as a far wider range of binaries, and an extra manual that was a bit like the RedHat Bibles you find in bookshops.

If you bought personal, as I did, you had to download all the extra binaries and development packages from SuSE's FTP servers.

3) Mirrors were handled automatically, though you could manually select too.

4) Actually, you could always freely redistribute SuSE with the proprietary YaST, so long as you didn't make money from the distributing. But now you can earn from it too.

5) No idea.

6) It didn't when I used it. URPMI is a lot better than plain RPM.

7) From SuSE 7.3, and setting up Mandrake 8.0 -> 9.1 on other people's machines, SuSE's package management GUI was by far the nicer. I'm not sure exactly how it handles it now though; you may find some screenshots on their web site that answer this question.

As a long time MDK user, I have some questions about SUSE that I'm hoping someone can answer....

I've used SuSE for a couple of years so I'll try to answer.

1) Aside from some commercial applications and ports to other architectures (which I don't have any current use for), what is the difference between the professional and personal versions of SUSE?

Personal doesn't come with development packages and some networking functions (at least the last personal I installed).

2) One of the nice things about MDK is that I get all of the development packages for the binaries. This means that I can compile stuff that MDK doesn't include. I do this a lot. The personal version of SUSE claims to only have 1 installation CD. How do SUSEers get the devel packages if they want to compile their own stuff? Do they need to get the source and compile, or are there RPM's provided by SUSE somewhere? If these RPM's are provided, how do you get them? Can I get them on CDROM or do I have to download them one at a time from an FTP site or something?

Downloadable from SuSE and mirrors.

3) How are updates handled? MDK uses mirrors to handle security updates. Does SUSE do the same in an automatic fashion?

Yes, Yast Online Update (YOU)

Do they use mirrors or direct downloads from their own servers?

Your choice.

4) One of the big reasons I use MDK is the fact that I *know* that I can say to someone, "Hey, you want to try Linux? I've got this MDK CD that I can burn for you and give you. Yes, it's totally legal to do this." In the past, SUSE wouldn't let me do this because of YAST. With the GPLing of YAST, does this mean that I'll be able to redistribute SUSE now?

You could always give away SuSE CDs legally, not not charge for them though.

5) This sounds petty, but it's important. I give MDK money because I know they have a good product. I would prefer not to give SUSE money until I have the same confidence. Are there any plans to have ISO's available for installs? Yes, I know you can do an FTP install, but I like installation CD's available if something goes wrong. Will cheapbytes have CD's available (likely determined by the answer to question 4)?

Don't know.

6) URPMI rocks. Does SUSE include something similar to URPMI or apt? For the most part, URPMI has made me forget all about dependancy hell that I used to have to deal with when I used RedHat.

YaST and/or aptget for SuSE.

7) One of the nice things about RedHat is their application installation GUI. MDK doesn't have anything like it, but when you use RedHat, you can go in and see (for example) that you have 10 of 12 KDE packages installed. Diving in deeper, you can see the 10 you have and the 2 that you don't have installed with a little info blurb on each one. This paints a nice overview of your system and helps people see what is available without having to grep through filenames on the CD. How does SUSE handle this?

Other people have answered most of these, so I'm only going to hit a few:

3) YOU (Yast Online Update) lets you pick from a list of servers & mirrors. Works great.

4) I've been using SuSE since 7.1 (like four years ago), first installed with a burned copy of a friend's CD's. Perfectly legal then, and now. I then went out and bought the upgrades when they came out.

5) They have a freely downloadable live CD ISO, which doesn't get enough press. It's like a SuSE Knoppix - it goes through the install process, detects your hardware, but dosen't write to the disk. It boots to a KDE desktop and lets you play around for a bit. The idea is that if that works, you go out and buy the CD set. This isn't a bad deal.

6) Never tried URPMI, but YAST does a pretty good job of package management. I don't have anything else to compare it against, but it's gotten much better over the years.

7) For my money, YAST alone is worth buying the CD set. It installs, it configures, it upgrades, integrates cleanly into Kcontrol, it slices, it dices... and does a good job of all of it. (except the dicing. Pretty shitty at that.)

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5) This sounds petty, but it's important. I give MDK money because I know they have a good product. I would prefer not to give SUSE money until I have the same confidence. Are there any plans to have ISO's available for installs? Yes, I know you can do an FTP install, but I like installation CD's available if something goes wrong. Will cheapbytes have CD's available (likely determined by the answer to question 4)?

As a long time Mandrake user as well I see the Mandrake "experience" as a distro that includes a lot of softwares on 3 CDs + the FTP contrib repository + the PLF repository for softwares with license issues (e.g libdvdcss, P2P stuff, etc..) and a decent Software Management tool (urpmi).
I'm a MDK club silver member.

Is there an equivalent to the MDK contrib repository and PLF repository?
If yes, can these "extra" repositories be handled via YAST2?

I'm considering trying the SuSE 9.1 Live CD when it's out and then maybe spend the money on 9.1 Pro.

Before you think about to change to SuSE hear what I've to say: I used SuSE for years but now I changeing to another distribution.

Why? Oh, it's quite simple. Many things are different from the Linux standard. If you don't get a special RPM for SuSE and wan't to install another RPM or compile by yourself, be sure that the installation target is a different one. SuSE installes e.g. all KDE stuff at /opt/kde3. Standard would be /usr!

The SuSE 9.0 e.g. don't inkludes Krusader. But if you compile it by yourself it will be installed at /usr/share/krusader. Normally the both possible installation pathes are /usr/share or /usr/lib. But not at SuSE.

Furthermore some of the configuration files are different. So it is not quite easy to live with that. Therefore, as I had enough with this trouble with SuSE I tried Fedora and Mandrake (Debian I don't get installed because they have problems with my DVD and CD drives). Both are better especially the Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition (the only thing I do not like is the packager and the menu program of Mandrake they are for the trashbin ;-)

And if you find some articles who to install or configer software for Linux be shure that at a SuSE system it is different.

Most of your points have been answered by others above. But I still missed a few.

Do not expect ISO's of the current SuSE version. It's not going to happen.
SuSE are perfectly honest about that. They need the money and kindly ask you to pay for the latest and the greatest. In return, you will get tons of high quality software and excellent documentation with it. Their documentation is worth the money alone.
However, they do provide you with an option to do an ftp-install. So you can actually get the current version for free if noone around you has the cd's for you to borrow.

I switched away from SuSE after 8.2 to Debian. My opinion is based on that. I cannot comment on the current version! Read the reviews to see if anything was improved.
Other posters already mentioned a few points. Yast is by no means perfect. It never managed to install a proper nvidea driver for my video card. I didn't care, because the dummy provided is enough for my needs. Second, it is not safe to use rpm's that are not labeled explicitly for use with SuSE. Many things such as config files and install locations differ from commonly used standards in other distros. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I have a dialup connection and quite often YOU (Yast Online Update) simply refused to do anything at all, without telling me why so I couldn't do anything to fix it.

You can easily check the availability of any package you desire for yourself. You can log in the ftp server and see if it's there. Everything is neatly organized in there. You should be able to get an answer to all your questions very quickly. If it's there, Yast can get it for you.
You will notice that previous versions are supported and rpm's are provided. Note, however that it usually takes some time before rpm's are there. Some commonly used stuff like KDE for example will show up immediately on SuSE servers. Other, less commonly used software will not show up immediately and it might take some time before SuSE rpm's are available.

Most of the bases have been covered, but as someone currently running both Mandrake (several installations of 9.1, 9.2) and Suse (8.2) I thought I'd offer a few observations.

- Suse's GUI config tools are generally less buggy -- for instance MDK 9.2's wireless LAN config and X setup using ATI or nVidia drivers are basically broken for me. In general YAST is a more reliable system configurator than Mandrake Control Center. On the other hand a couple of the MDK machines are CL-only servers and have run and even distro-upgraded via URPMI without having to be console logged in for over a year -- I actually love MDK as a CL distribution!

- I've done the Suse FTP install a few times with no problems ... in general Suse's servers and mirrors are less crowded than the MDK mirrors. If you're nervous about doing the FTP install, you can always mirror the FTP dir to a local machine ... although that's going to be several gigs.

- CL YAST is a full-window terminal app, which is great for newbies because you can get a GUI even in an ssh term or from console login. However I like to script URPMI and run it from cron ... maybe there's a way to do that with YAST ... anyone know?

- Suse is in general a more finished, polished workstation OS. It's less buggy and clearly reflects a much more thorough, systematic integration and testing process. As people have said, system layout may be a bit different and config files a bit different, but it's nothing major, and all the config files are well commented.

I don't know about answering all your questions. It sounds like you have been in Linux world longer than I have been, but I do have this to say.
I just recently bought the Suse 9.0 Professional retail box, and this thing rocks!
Not only did it come with 5 cd's, I also got a double sided DVD if I wanted to install it that way! (Which of course I did, a lot less disk swapping that way!)
It also came with two very good professional grade manuals in the box!
And the YaST utility is great! That is once I got past the NVidea driver problems!
(No, it isn't Suse's fault, it is NVidea's fault. They won't GPL the drivers)
Otherwise, the whole package is great!

No, Ximian is owned by Novell, so they will ship Ximian desktop, but Nat Friedman is not SuSE's platform strategist. SuSE is committed to KDE and the customers request it. What SUSE wants is better integration of gtk and non-qt/kde apps. And a Suse guy asked me: "What's wrong with qt/KDE?" they want to encourage Win-Programmers to recompile under Linux and use qt.

Btw: As wine now compiles MFC with gcc I wonder if we could create a linux qt wrapper for MFC.

If one thing should be quickly apparent about Sun, it would be they like to have control over their products. They would lose some if started using Qt. Especially given that Qt is in direct competition with Java (its write once, compile anywhere with Qt... pretty close to Java's goal).

As far as the topic is concerned, I do find it somewhat worrying that Novell is willing to open SuSe's crown jewels. Hopefully it is just a sign of their commentment to open source software.

There's a piece over on OSNews about Novell's plans. They're looking to crate an uber-desktop, starting with SuSE 10, that mixes the best parts of both Gnome and KDE (I'm guessing it's e.g. a panel from gnome, filemanager from KDE, best of breed apps a la Redhat, unified theming engine (via GTK-Qt) and a certral Gnome/KDE desktop config utility.

I hate the word bloat. It's so overused. The fact of the matter is that in the short to medium term there will be at least two core toolkits in use on Unix desktops (with several wrappers), and users will generally have programs running simultaneously using both. So you might as well get both loaded right at the start and running together for faster startup times overall.

Yet, it could be, that YaST 2 is really only a graphical fronend to the same (old) YaST backend.
Still the question would be, if the part, they're now GPL'ing is only the backend part or also the graphical (Qt-based ?) front end.

AFAIK the old YaST 1 has been completely removed from SuSE Linux, YaST had been completely rewritten for version 2. And I dont think they are talking about GPLing that old version but about version 2 which is actually very much more powerful.

From the eWeek article recently featured in Slashdot, Chris Schlager, vice president of research and development for SUSE said:

"You won't see a lot of that SuSE Linux Desktop 9.1 or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9.0. It's not clear what the name will be, but you'll see the first major results of this effort in the next versions of SUSE Linux, which will be released toward the end of the year."

In the meantime, "the work has already started," Schlager said, with the Ximian Desktop 2.0 being merged into the SuSE Linux Desktop 9.1. As for potential conflicts, he said simply, "I don't think turf wars will happen here."

So the question is, what aspects of Ximian are they going to exactly 'merge' in SUSE? And what consequences will this have on KDE and SUSE?

Yeah, I've been waiting to see if anyone would raise this article over here. My reading of the whole thing was they are planning to cannibalise both K and G to come up with some new desktop, say using Kparts and GConf, KIO and Gail, etc... Now, how the hell that could EVER work, I don't know???

Now the weird thing is he says it's technically impossible to merge the two into one, but then says they will take the best of each to create one desktop. Now how is that different, what does he mean??? He says Ximian and Suse have the programming muscle to do "it" whatever "it" is. I think the community deserves a clearer explanation of their intent.

Since Ximian Desktop was never mentioned at all in the blurb for Suse 9.1, I find this curious also. Probably what it means is that Ximian Desktop is being taken apart, and bits integrated into Suse Desktops. Red Carpet is probably a candidate here.

"That means the Gnome *Desktop* is merged into the SuSE Linux (Desktop) *Distribution*. In other words: The development versions of SUSE Linux are now gnome based by default."

Nope, I think you're being paranoid here. This doesn't match up with how Suse is promoting what they are doing, the software they are using or their investments in KDE i.e. KDE Open Office. Look at what is actually happening.

"Bad news, but that was expectable... why should a company buy a Gnome Desktop comp. and a Linux distribution, esp. in the USA, where gnome is more accepted then KDE."

Considering the market share of Windows, Gnome is not more accepted in the US than Europe. Let's keep our feet on the ground please.